The men at leisure scattered
around over the hills on each side of the route taken by the train, and
in advance of it, hunting camping places and making a regular picnic of
it. There were no hardships, and one man had a fiddle which he tuned up
evenings and gave plenty of fine music. Joy and happiness seemed the
rule, and all of the train were certainly having a good time of it.
But gradually there came a change as the wagon wheels rolled westward.
The valleys seemed to have no streams in them, and the mountain ranges
grew more and more broken, and in the lower ground a dry lake could be
found, and water and grass grew scarce--so much so that both men and
oxen suffered. These dry lake beds deceived them many times. They seemed
as if containing plenty of water, and off the men would go to explore.
They usually found the distance to them about three times as far as they
at first supposed, and when at last they reached them they found no
water, but a dry, shining bed, smooth as glass, but just clay, hard as a
rock. Most of these dry lakes showed no outlet, nor any inlet for that
matter, though at some period in the past they must have been full of
water. Nothing grew in the shape of vegetables or plants except a small,
stunted, bitter brush.
Away to the west and north there was much broken country, the mountain
ranges higher and rougher and more barren, and from almost every sightly
elevation there appeared one or more of these dry lake beds. One night
after about three days of travel the whole of the train of twenty seven
wagons was camped along the bank of one of these lakes, this one with a
very little water in it not more than one fourth or one half an inch in
depth, and yet spread out to the width of a mile or more.
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